Preparing hors d’oeuvres can be a lot of work. Just ask eight employees of the financial service firm GE Capital Solutions.
They traveled from various parts of the country recently to attend seminars in the firm’s Danbury offices.
On the last day, they found themselves in the kitchen of Loree’s Catering in Bethel, preparing hors d’oeuvres for supervisors as part of a corporate team-building exercise.
“They have no inkling they’re coming here or that they’re going to be doing this,” said Loree Ogan, owner of Loree’s.
Wendy Bradley, commercial development leader for GE Capital Solutions, organized the event.
“This type of exercise helps employees learn to work together and get to know one another,” Bradley said. “It encourages networking and team building.”
Ogan has added a lot of innovative touches to her business over the last 20 years, and one of the most recent is team-building cooking classes.
Using cooking to promote an esprit de corps and employee bonding had its beginnings on the West Coast, said Ogan, who began offering team-building classes three years ago.
For the GE exercise, participants were divided into two teams that competed against each other. Each was told to make two hors d’oeuvres using Ogan’s recipes and ingredients.
After that, each team was asked to go into Loree’s refrigerators and larders, choose any ingredients, and create a third hors d’oeuvre.
The teams had about two hours to prepare their appetizers, which would be tasted and judged by four GE Capital supervisors who were to arrive later in the evening.
“We’re calling this a cross between ‘The Apprentice’ and ‘Iron Chef,'” Ogan said.
Once the employees arrived, Ogan handed out aprons to each member of the group and explained what they would be doing.
She reminded them their teams would be judged on production skills, team involvement, taste and attractiveness, creative use of raw materials, and finished product.
Most of the employees were smiling as they tied on their aprons and made their way into Loree’s well-equipped kitchen.
The four members of Team A took their places on the left of a huge island and began prepping ingredients for vegetable strudel and potato skins made from small red-skinned potatoes filled with chopped bacon, sauteed onions and cheddar cheese and topped with sour cream.
“Are these washed?” Trisha Tiernay, a new employee who lives in Anaheim, Calif., said as she washed and began slicing yellow squash and carrots for the strudel, while Emmanuel Korhone of Atlanta, cut up and seeded a large red pepper.
“Wow, Emmanuel! You really know how to slice a pepper,” Susan Improta, coordinator of the company’s Commercial Leadership Program, called out.
“Are you kidding? I never sliced a pepper in my life,” Korhone said.
Meanwhile, over on Team B’s side of the island, Antuan Shorter, also of Atlanta, was carefully rolling out dough. His group was to make 60 crab meat mini-quiches and stuffed mushroom caps.
He placed a round cutter on the dough and made imprints to see how many small round pastries would fit.
“What if I can’t get 60 out of this dough?” he asked Ogan.
“Well, then, we’ll just have to grade you accordingly,” she said with mock seriousness.
Shorter, much to his relief, was successful in making 60 small pastries, and his teammate, Jason Fronheiser of Philadelphia, filled each with crab meat and an egg mixture.
For the new hors d’oeuvres, one team made a fruit salad using fresh pineapple and red grapes. The other sliced red peppers, topped them with Jack cheese, then slid them in the oven to create what they called “Pepper Jack Poppers.”
“I don’t mean to rush you,” Ogan announced to the group, “but you have 20 minutes!”
Tablecloths were unfurled and thrown on tabletops. Foods were plated within seconds, and centerpieces seemed to appear from nowhere.
“Four minutes!” Ogan called out.
“Stall them!” one of the participants shouted as four supervisors got out of a car.
Fronheiser took off his apron, placed a folded dish towel over his right arm and pulling himself up to full height, assumed the pose of a maitre d’.
“Good evening. And how are you folks this evening?” he said as the supervisors approached his team’s table.
Inside, teammates were high-fiving each other and consuming the hors d’oeuvres.
The team that had made the colorful fruit salad came in first.
“I think it’s because I offered to clean up,” Fronheiser said. “That was the tiebreaker.”
